nothing is exempt from resurrection
by ohmytheon
Summary: He and Furiosa move together as one. He's never felt something like this before, not even when he piloted Road Warrior. It's easy to fall into a rhythm of sorts when the person next to him is just as broken as he is, her shattered pieces aligning just so with his. That he can make sense of, that he understands. [Mad Max: Fury Road/Pacific Rim]


Author's Note: As usual, instead of writing any of the prompts and requests I've got lined up, I get attached to a new fandom and go full steam ahead in it with AUs. My suggestion is that you go see Mad Max: Fury Road and have your mind blown and your emotions wrecked by like sixteen lines of dialogue. So yeah, in line with the post going around that talks about how drift compatible Max and Furiosa are in the movie, here's a Pacific Rim AU no one asked for. The title is from a poem called "Say Uncle" by Kay Ryan. This may be a little OOC, but I tried to keep it as close as possible with also some vague remembrance of the old movies too. This movie is ridiculously fresh in my mind and I listened to the soundtrack the entire time.

Disclaimer: None of this is mine. That is but a dream.

* * *

 **nothing is exempt from resurrection**

* * *

Furiosa is eight when the first kaiju descends onto San Francisco like a curse. She sits wide-eyed in front of the telly on the couch, bunched up next to her mother and grandmother, and watches without blinking as the news reports live feeds of the chaotic destruction. The monster tears through the city as planes rain bullets and missiles on its massive body, but nothing seems to stop it, not as it slices through the Golden Gate Bridge like it's a cake or steps through buildings like they were just doors to be pushed open.

Her mouth hangs open as she clutches a blanket against her chest. She cannot look away; she cannot even blink. The sun rises before the kaiju is brought down, but she doesn't feel tired. She doesn't feel much of anything.

It's only until her mother moves to turn off the television that Furiosa finally snaps out of the daze she'd fallen into. She peers up at the woman, the only parent she has ever known. Her mother is strong. She is unwavering yet unfailingly warm. Her mother never falters.

And yet the light-haired woman rubs at her mouth, her green eyes frantic, as she gapes out the window, looking in what Furiosa thinks is the direction of the US, in the direction of the kaiju. There is a strange look about her, an even stranger feel, one that Furiosa doesn't recognize at first in her mother.

It's fear.

Instead of getting her ready for school, as she normally would be doing at this hour, her mother leads her to her small bedroom and tucks her back into bed. Furiosa doesn't know how she's going to fall asleep, not with giant lizards running about in her mind, but her mother doesn't take no for an answer.

"Mum," Furiosa suddenly says when her mother is tugging the curtains back to darken the room. "I thought you said monsters weren't real."

That's what her mother told her after she had a nightmare. Monsters don't exist. They don't live in your cupboard or under your bed. They don't hide in the dark or in the woods. The only monsters, her mother said, weren't really monsters at all, at least not the kind in the stories. They were bad people. Those were the real monsters. Except… Furiosa frowns as she turns the idea of the kaiju over in her head. That one certainly looked like a monster to her.

For what seems like hours, her mother doesn't move, one hand still on the curtain, the other back to worrying at her mouth, like she's hiding words behind her lips, things she can't say just yet. Furiosa is only eight. She is a child. She shouldn't have to worry about these things. She shouldn't be scared. Her mother is never scared.

Monsters are real and they would come out from the deep of the ocean. She will be scared. (She will never be scared again.)

* * *

He stays away from the call of the ocean for as long as he can, sticks to the deserts of the land, where he feels is safest. Let the coast deal with the problem; let them figure out what to do. He's got other things on his mind. Sure, he's living in a continent that is literally sitting in the middle of an ocean of turmoil, but he's not there and it's not his problem. The kaiju are one thing, but life goes on. Not everyone's world stopped revolving the day the first kaiju broke out of the water.

Many later though, of course, of course it does. The kaiju learn quickly and they leave no one untouched. No one will come out of this unscathed.

It's his wife that suggests joining the PPDC. She cares too much about what is going on in the world, thinks that they need to make a difference in the world, especially with a little one along the way. He can't look at her swollen belly without picturing a world in which his daughter will grow up constantly fearing for her life. Will she ever know a world in which kaiju don't exist and haunt the coastlines of the Pacific?

"You're a cop," his wife tells him, a tired smile on her face. He's not a great cop, has a bad habit of finding himself in deep water more often than not, which she seems to think is the perfect reason why he should sign up for the Jaeger Program. "Protecting is in your blood. And apparently they need people with thick heads."

He thinks about asking her to move somewhere, anywhere but near the coast. He thinks about leaving the country, about flying to Europe maybe or even the States, just somewhere that is far inland and away from the Pacific Ocean. He thinks about telling her that he's afraid, not only for himself, but for her and their child. He thinks about admitting that he doesn't know if he can protect anyone from this.

Instead he signs up for the Jaegar Program in the PPDC and finds himself in an academy once more, learning how to fight monsters with monsters.

 _I'll protect them,_ he promises the ocean as the unflinching sun glares down on him, _or I'll die trying._

* * *

Screams fill her lungs until there is no air left in her and she sags to the hospital floor, her grandmother's chest pressed against her back and the old woman's arms slipped around her. They are like branches that Furiosa is barely clinging to, holding her up just enough so that she cannot crumple completely into the ground.

"She can't be!" Furiosa throws the words out of her mouth, each word a vehement punch to the news. Tears streak lines down her dust-covered cheeks, burning and unforgiving. She can feel the sobs building in her chest, ready to ravage her, but she shoves them down deep, deeper than the Breach itself. Her hands clench into fists until her nails dig into her palms, blood seeping out slowly. "She can't be dead!"

Her grandmother does not let go of Furiosa, as if she'll spring up and run to fight the kaiju with her bare hands, but for as tight as the woman's grip is, she can't seem to pull herself to her feet anyways. It's like the slab of concrete fell onto her instead and the weight of it is too much to bear. She folds in on herself even more until there's only space left in her for rage.

"She is gone," her grandmother says quietly.

Furiosa wraps her arms around herself, gripping onto her grandmother's arms now, and violently shakes her head. Better than sobs shaking her body. She will not cry. She tries to open her mouth to hotly deny it again, but instead she only chokes and she snaps her mouth shut so hard that she bites her tongue.

Tears fall onto the back of her head, wetting her long blond hair. Her grandmother is not the only one that is weeping in the halls of the hospital that the kaiju magically did not destroy along with the rest of the city. "You must accept this, Furiosa. You cannot hold onto this rage forever. It will kill you. She would not want that."

Her mother is strong. Her mother is brave. Her mother never falters.

(Her mother is lying on a cot, dead.)

Furiosa howls. Cold settles in her bones, hardening her against everything. The world turns to dust.

* * *

 _Road Warrior._ His lips quirk into something resembling a smirk before fading away just as quickly as it appeared, almost as if it never existed in the first place. He darts his eyes around the Shatterdome, but no one is watching him despite the itch in his shoulders that tells him otherwise. Turning his attention back to the stunning jaeger before him, he nods his head in thought and turns back to head to his bunker. The machine is bulky and larger than he could have ever anticipated, but it's proven itself to be handy in a fight already. Still, like any good machine, he'll need his own time to rest and repair if he's going to survive the next fight.

As he lies awake in bed next to his sleeping wife, wondering when the next kaiju will come, if it'll be near him or too far for him to do anything about it, he feels a sense of…restlessness. The waiting is the hardest part. He supposes that's wrong. Maybe the kaiju will never come again. Maybe after getting defeated enough times, they'll simply choose another planet or another time and fade from existence. The jaegers can be put on display, the pilots immortalized in textbooks, and all will turn to legend.

Crazier things have been thought before, yes? Certainly they have. After all, for all the years before the kaiju appeared, only crazy people believed that aliens existed and not even those people predicted that aliens would come from deep beneath the ocean.

But no, he feels like he's sitting at a red light, waiting for it to turn green, waiting for his time to take his turn. Something akin to eagerness sits in the back of his mind, or maybe it's dread. Sometimes he can't tell the difference. Maybe that's the jaeger tech doing. After all, he might not be a Mark I pilot, but Mark II isn't all that much of an upgrade. The difference is the radiation poisoning. He was saved from that at least.

"Da?"

He peers over his wife's still form and catches sight of his daughter standing at their bed, rubbing at her eyes. They're one of the few families here, most of them either choosing to have their spouses and children off base or not having a family at all. (Jaeger pilots aren't known for good family people.)

The girl is small, only two and just now starting to get into trouble. His wife says their daughter takes after him. She says it with a laugh. He's not so sure it's a good thing. "Hm?" He pats the mattress next to him and the little one crawls into the bed, carefully maneuvering over her mother's body so that she can lie down next to him. Her hair is dark and a tad bit curly, like her mother's. She looks almost nothing like him, so tiny and fragile, like a doll. He can't imagine how he helped create someone like this.

She reaches out and places her small hands on his bearded face. He'll need to shave soon. Not supposed to have a beard when you're a jaeger pilot. It's all a part of the uniform. He's not a cop now. The PPDC is more like the military, humanity's robot warriors. "I had a nightmare," his daughter whispers.

His eyes almost soften at his daughter's face. She doesn't look exactly scared, but he can see the vestiges of the dream in her eyes. He pictures the last kaiju he helped defeat with _Road Warrior_ and then pictures what might've happened if he and the jaeger failed. That is not only his nightmare, but also his reality. He pulls her into his arms and his child nuzzles against him like she's trying to burrow into his chest. He sighs. She sniffs. He doesn't fall asleep until he's sure that she's drifted off again. The alarm doesn't go off, but the kaiju haunt his dreams anyway, his daughter's cries and his wife's screams bouncing around his skull.

* * *

After practically tossing the boy across the room, Furiosa nearly flinches as she stands up straight, awkward and stiff like a plank. It's not supposed to be a fight, but she can't help but feel like everything is a fight these days. She's a lithe little thing. Most of the boys joked that they might break her in the Kwoon if they weren't too careful. At least they joked during the first few weeks. When it was clear that she learned fighting techniques much faster than them and already knew a few of her own thanks to her mother's home lessons, they stopped joking.

Now it's a matter of pride for them, like they're here for a bit of fun.

None of this is fun, not to her. Every time she sees them laughing about it, heat flares inside her gut and she can't help but feel like smacking them over the head with the hanbo whenever they're in the combat room. She starts thinking about them teasing her about how serious she is and her stare goes flat and her body turns cold suddenly, like the heat of the desert never touched her in her life.

The Marshall never stops her when she goes on a rampage, tearing her way through the recruits, but he doesn't have to, not when she berates herself after the fact. It's supposed to be a dial up, a bit like a dance, but Furiosa can't remember ever dancing. The memories of prancing around in the living room to music with her grandmother seem more like a film she once watched. What she remembers is fighting for her life, struggling her way through the debris of her home to find her mother's partially crushed body, bloodying her fists against the funeral home wall after the visitation ended, signing up for the PPDC in what could've been her blood for all she knows.

Taking a deep breath, she forces herself to calm down, turn loose, as she watches the boy pull himself to his face. There's blood on his lip. She doesn't blink, but she feels a stab of both success and guilt. That doesn't stop her from knocking him down again and again until she's called off and the next pair match up against one another.

No one ever stops her from fighting so viciously, not even when they recognize the signs of someone that will be difficult to pair up no matter how brilliant their scores in the Academy are. Furiosa tells herself that she'll stop; she can't keep making enemies out of people she could be drift compatible with. After all the fighting she's done though, she cannot do this alone, can't pilot a jaeger on her own, and that grates her more than anything. She clings to her cold rage like it is her companion. It's all she has, the closest thing to hope that she can remember, an old friend to keep her company.

* * *

They will tell stories about _Road Warrior_ long after he's dead, should the world survive the kaiju, but it takes a long time for him to realize that he's not dead even then.

They will speak of how the jaeger fell to its knees as a massive and unprecedented Category III kaiju shredded its life. They will weave stories of the kaiju tearing into the city after the jaeger failed, the planes bombing the monster in panic and burning in the sky, the unguarded people screaming and pleading and dying. They will whisper in awe and horror about _Road Warrior_ crawling to its feet and staggering towards the city and ripping and blasting the kaiju to shreds until little is recognizable of either and both are on lying prone on the ground, dead to the world.

No one remembers the only remaining pilot dragging himself out of the torn head of the machine, burnt and branded by his failure, blood seeping out of him, helmet half torn off. No one talks about the wild eyes of a man lost. No one tells of a man tearing his pilot gear off as he runs wildly through a desolate city, stumbling and crawling over wreckage, ignoring the sirens and weeping and pleading and praying.

Certainly no one whispers of a mad man's howls as the crumpled ruins of a half destroyed Shatterdome, the first one to fall victim to a kaiju since the beginning.

 _You promised you'd protect us._

 _Where were you?_

 _How could you fail?_

He shakes his head, stares at the beam in front of him. When he looks around, there's no one standing next to him a hundred feet in the air, the closest man working on another beam three stories down. The beam in front of him is still hot from being worked on. He hunches for a moment, glances back to the ground, and then at the beam. No one is with him. His eyes turn to the sky, thinking of how far the Coastal Wall will be built around Sydney, thinking of how far a man can fall before he cannot fall any longer.

 _You're the best jaeger pilot there is, Da!_

He can't possibly fall any further.

* * *

The fight takes a turn for the worse. The kaiju begin to evolve. Things change.

Furiosa grits her teeth as she watches the mechanics work tirelessly on her _War Rig_ , sparks flying everywhere in an attempt to repair the damage that is done. A few of the people in the Shatterdome cast her wary looks, eyes lingering on where her left arm used to be, but wisely no one says a word to her. She spends most of her time in here, keeping a careful eye on her jaeger. No one tells her exactly that she is out of the PPDC – no one could ever tell someone like Furiosa that – and she's far too stubborn to admit it herself.

It has nothing to do with her arm. People should know that, but they don't. After all, the greatest minds in the world came together to build giant robots to fight giant aliens. They could give her a downsized version of a replacement for her arm. At least she isn't getting any pity comments anymore. It wounded her at first, but she's learned to accept it readily enough. There's still some fight left in her, left in _War Rig_ too, despite the fact that jaegers and their pilots are dropping like flies. No, she will never stop fighting, not until color has returned to the world again, until endless fear is gone and hope springs again.

Still, she cannot pilot War Rig with her fury alone, not without a co-pilot to drift with.

"How long before she's fully functional again?" Furiosa demands from a passing mechanic.

The boy – because he is a boy, scrawny and pale and so very bright-eyed – pushes his goggles off his head and gives her something of a startled look. "A week, maybe less."

She nods her head and then leaves the bay area. The boy doesn't follow her to ask questions about how she can even think about piloting a jaeger again. She's been out of the game too long, stuck in the hospital and physical therapy, but he doesn't know her. No one truly knows her. She's not from here, from his land of desolation and giving up. She doesn't respect the people that are slowly shutting down the Jaeger Program in place of the Coastal Wall Defense. A bloody wall isn't going to do anything against a kaiju's claws.

* * *

Everything in him is screaming as he steps off the helicopter. He eyes the building and all its inhabitants warily, watches them scamper in the rain, giving orders and taking orders. Five women argue with each other loudly enough to be heard over the noise, gesticulating towards large glass chambers that hold what look like bits of kaiju. They stalk into the Shatterdome without breaking eye contact with one another.

His eyes latch onto a shaved-haired woman standing still in the rain, holding an umbrella up with what looks like to be a mechanical arm. Eyebrows twitch up slightly, but he says nothing as the Marshal introduces him to his second in command. They both stare at each other, lips pressed together in thin lines. He almost cocks his head, the ghost of the movement there, but stops himself.

He sees… He sees something in her, something broken that is so palpable that he's almost surprised that she's still here. He sees a mirror in front of him. His own flat expression, lips dry from accidental and forgotten dehydration despite the rain, cold and analytical eyes. He almost doesn't see her. But then when he does see her, it's hard not to see anything else, hard not to realize that he's just met her and doesn't understand her. But he knows himself at least and that much he's sure of and so he recognizes that he somehow knows her too.

"Furiosa," the woman says, finally holding out her non-mechanical hand. He grips her hand, shakes it, but doesn't say anything in return. She gives him a hard look, but doesn't press him for answers. Instead, she turns on her heel and begins to head for the doors. He just watches her for a moment before she calls back, "You following, fool? I'd rather not leave what is apparently humanity's last bit of hope behind."

* * *

This fight is nothing like she's ever been in. This fight feels light and heavy at the same time, like she can barely breathe or think but she doesn't have to do either to know which way to step or where to look. She slinks around the Kwoon, eyes trained on the man before her, and she feels that old viciousness come out of her again, but it feels different somehow. Warmer. More understanding. When she leaps to attack him, he steps in tune with her, their hanbos clacking, and he steps into her and she sweeps to the side.

(This fight is not a fight. It is a dance.)

She knows after finally knocking him to the ground, her hanbo pressed against his neck and her face close to his, things have changed. His eyes are more alert than she's ever seen from anyone's and he looks at so intently that it's almost like he's looking into her. But then he looks away and she pulls away from him. She stands up straight and then reaches out. He grabs her hand and she helps him back to his feet. She's never done that before.

One of the members of the research division, a tall and beautiful blond-haired woman, smiles brightly at her. Furiosa nearly smiles back, but it's enough for the woman to recognize that things are different. Something has shifted in her, something she can't quite explain on her own, and that's strange as it is. Even when she had a co-pilot before, they'd only been drift compatible out of necessity. This is…this is something new.

Furiosa throws a glance at the man next to her as he scratches the back of his head almost thoughtfully. There are times when she has to wonder if this former jaeger pilot is really even here. She knows his records and his deeds. _Road Warrior_ was one of the elite jaeger teams before it went down. Only one pilot survived and he remained alive and conscious to defeat the kaiju on his own. The man that looks ready to bolt out of the Shatterdome at any second does not look like that man.

He sweeps his hand up to wipe the sweat off his face at the same time she does, takes a deep steady breath, glances at the floor, at her, at the Marshall, and then off at something in the corner of the room. She was warned that he's a man of little words, but she found quite easily that she didn't need him to speak all that much for her to recognize what he was saying.

* * *

The Drift is silence. You don't need to speak in the Drift. Two minds connected through neural activity to pilot a jaeger together. The Drift is something of its own though, a different plane to the physical world.

But the moment the sequence is initiated, Furiosa feels like she's drowning in memories. Her grandmother singing songs and brushing a young Furiosa's shiny hair, her mother teaching her how to throw a punch after she comes home from a fight at school, speeding through the desert in a beat up car, tearing through rubble shouting someone's name, learning to drive a stick shift, learning to pilot a jaeger, holding her wife's hand as she screams and pushes through labor, graduating from the Police Academy, meeting herself and knowing her immediately, meeting her co-pilot.

Things lock into place in their minds and Furiosa takes a gasping breath. She used to know the Drift like the back of her mind, but it hit her like a wave this time. She doesn't have to glance over at her co-pilot to know that he's thinking the same thing. She can feel him gently probing around in her mind. Strangely it doesn't feel obtrusive; if anything it feels like he…belongs. She's about to congratulate him when she feels something shift inside her. She twists and looks down – pictures her arm being amputated at the hospital, blinks, and then shakes her head.

"Hey, what's going on in there?" Dag, the J-Tech, calls over the com.

Furiosa huffs at herself. "I'm here, just–"

"He's way out of alignment!" Dag suddenly shouts.

Her mind slides to the left and then upside down. Furiosa turns to her co-pilot, but he's looking straight ahead, eyes wider than she's ever seen and gone. She can't feel him in her head anymore and she tries to reach out to him, touch his, but it's gone and he's gone and–

* * *

(His heart leaps into his throat when he realizes that he doesn't know where to look in the rubble. What used to be the Shatterdome is practically sliced in half. He digs through concrete alongside rescue units. Half his suit is gone; the parts of his skin that is showing have angry, red lines etched into it. The bodies come, but he wades through them like they're not even there.

He digs and digs and digs until his nails are torn and he's covered in dust and dirt and his nails are broken and–

A small hand holding a doll sticks out from under a slab of concrete. He shouts for someone to help him. People come and they lift. What he sees underneath almost causes him to drop it all over again. He drags a small child's body out, blood smearing on the gray stone, and pulls her into his arms. The sounds that come out of his mouth don't seem human anymore. People step back from him warily. He clutches the girl against his chest, pressing his head lips against her head, rocking back and forth, muttering under his breath

I promised to keep you alive, I promised to protect you, I promised–

Behind him, Furiosa watches the scene unfold in horror like it's a movie. She knows that she needs to stop this before it goes any further, needs to pull him back from chasing the R.A.B.I.T. Mostly she knows that she shouldn't be seeing this. It isn't for her. She forces herself to step forward and place a hand on his shoulder. "Hey, listen to me. You've gotta come back. This…" The words drift along the wind. They don't seem like her own here in this dream of his. "You can't hold onto this. You have to remember hope. Listen–")

* * *

Turns out that when the world is ending, even screw ups that have lost almost everything can be given a chance to save the world, maybe even redeem themselves a little. That's what every fight after feels like to him, but with each kaiju that they knock down, he feels a piece of him coming back. Every time he and Furiosa connect in the Drift, he understands things a little better.

They move together as one. He's never felt something like this before, not even when he piloted _Road Warrior_. It's easy to fall into a rhythm of sorts when the person next to him is just as broken as he is, her shattered pieces aligning just so with his. That he can make sense of, that he understands. The more they fight together, the more they pilot _War Rig_ , driving the jaeger like it's an extension of them both, the more he feels whole.

One, two, three kaiju down, all in succession. He moves; she moves; the jaeger moves. They barely speak a word aloud to one another while piloting, but he can hear her in his mind clear as day, like she was there from the very beginning. When they're connected through the Drift, she is the only other voice that he can hear, all the other voices drowned out, like they can't bear to be around her.

The Drift is silent.

He could almost go to sleep.

When they fight, it's like Furiosa knows what he's thinking before he's even thought of it himself. They swing to the left, grabbing a freighter that they can use to bash against a kaiju's skull. _War Rig_ doesn't fight cleanly, but they get the job done, leaving explosions and fire and dead kaiju in their wake. She doesn't question his decisions when they do something out of the ordinary fighting style; instead, she rolls with it, like it was her idea all along and maybe it was, maybe it was his, maybe it was theirs together. Things get blended in the Drift.

He doesn't mind. (The Drift is silence.)

* * *

Going after the Breach was their one last ditch effort to save humanity. _War Rig_ falls into the Breach with its pilots both screaming alike, grasping onto a kaiju so that they can get through to the other side. Everything else before that is a blur, but he knows that the machine is just barely holding together.

When they actually pass through the Breach, he heaves in a deep breath, but his mind feels cloudy and empty. He reaches out to Furiosa, but she doesn't respond immediately. Glancing sharply to his right, he spots what's wrong. His co-pilot is nearly out of oxygen, wheezing in her suit, head lolling about in a daze right before unconsciousness. He takes action immediately, unlocking himself and unplugging his oxygen cable so that he can plug it into hers.

"Hey, hey," he mutters to her as he fiddles with the oxygen. It's not plugging in right. She's not moving anymore, going limp in her suit, the wheezing quieting. "C'mon, hold on. You've gotta hold on. Can't leave me like this."

He looks into her helmet. Spots his reflection on the glass and sees fear in his eyes. That's something he hasn't seen on himself in a while.

 _You promised to protect me! Why did you let me die?_

The oxygen valve clicks into place. He stills as she slowly begins to open her eyes. He's running low on oxygen himself now, but he feels like he can finally breathe again.

"Took you…long enough…Max," she mumbles. He looks at her. She looks at him. "Time to let 'em up."

As they fall through the Breach, she finishes the last bit of protocol to set up the bomb. It takes every last bit of strength they have in them to do that. He sets up their escape pods. They remind him of caskets.

"See you at the top," Max tells her before he pushes her escape pod release first. He hits his next and clenches his fists tightly at his sides as the pod floats up. The bomb blows underneath him, pushing him faster. He closes his eyes, wills himself not to see his dead daughter and wife, forces himself to picture the first time he met Furiosa instead, her intent glares, her willingness to knock him on his back if he didn't live up to her standards.

He feels like he's falling up for the first time.

* * *

Of course he leaves her to all the press by herself.

Furiosa doesn't begrudge him for that, instead shakes her head and grins mentally when she pictures the way Max hides himself away from the cameras and reporters. She can just imagine him losing it in the middle of an interview and that's something no one in the PPDC wants. It's not like she enjoys all the questions and publicity – it's definitely far from what she's comfortable – but she also knows that one of them has to do it. He blends back into the background, fading away from existence as he once did before while she plays at being the face.

Furiosa understands that about him. He's a man of few words and while the world would want more from him, she doesn't expect anything from him at all, not when she already knows what he wants to say to her in the Drift.


End file.
